


Finally bringing him home

by rabble_dabble_writes



Series: The Journey's Home [2]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Angst, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Angst with a Happy Ending, M/M, now i wonder how you hide text, the key to finding it is searching for whats hidden
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-07
Updated: 2020-09-07
Packaged: 2021-03-06 22:22:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,215
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26342569
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rabble_dabble_writes/pseuds/rabble_dabble_writes
Summary: The "extra" bit of story for those who went snooping. I'm a sucker for happy endings, but you'll have to find it first...
Relationships: Implied John Egbert/Karkat Vantas
Series: The Journey's Home [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1914175
Comments: 1
Kudos: 10





	Finally bringing him home

He watches over it, carefully, alone. 

This was the choice he had made. From the beginning, his entire intention was to find the other way, look for another reason, seek out a path that made it worth it. In his beginning, deep to his core, he's always known that if it came down to it, he would be willing to be the person to make the sacrifice needed for every one of his friends. The tumbles of the other timeline, the problems and solutions he missed because he was away, it carries a heavy weight of thought on his shoulders only in the name of sacrifice. The sentence sprawled onto his back, the ultimate fact of  _ John Egbert had failed  _ which painfully rang loudly in the distant silence. He had nothing, anymore, but that silence, himself, and the universe in front of him. 

He doesn't know how long he has been doing so. He has no way to display a time, nothing to make a clock with, no convenient player to explain to him down the closest second of the world. Everything, ever since the closing of the door, has been still. Frozen, umoving,  _ stilled, _ and he  _ knows  _ that he is not supposed to remain in a sterilized reality. There is nowhere for him to go to, no place he could remain except what little pocket of reality was left surrounding the frog. And, carefully, he watched it. 

He can't shrug off the feeling that, somehow, it is watching him back.

Figments of his friends clinged close to his dreams. They sang and danced, they celebrated their arrival into the new world and into their new home. He thought a lot about how they would try to live their lives, how they would adjust to the exciting normalness of it all. Sometimes, although rarely would his brain permit, he would dream of his childhood home and would be standing in his living room, among the ensemble of his friends who would tell him  _ Happy Birthday _ and for once in a long, few,  _ hard  _ years, he would feel happy and at home. He would open his ironically funny gift from Dave and Terezi, receive a hug from Jade and possibly Rose, teach Kanaya and Karkat the best way to get all the icing off a cupcake. His mind would allow him to be happy and talk with his friends, feeling a sense of shallow sorrow and harmonious nostalgia, before concluding the day with old Earth movies.

And then, he'd wake up in the void. 

He looked at the thing often. It just floated above the platform, captivating and breathing, glittering amongst it's lillypond. The lillis gave him a sense of peace, like there was meaning in the faded pink blooming blossom. He wondered, if somehow he were inside, how big those lillis would look peering out? If he went to the edge, would he be able to see through to the other side? Or was it simply too big on the inside for that to ever happen?

He misses his friends. He looks over old pesterlogs, seeking a sense of familiarity and just being left with loneliness.  _ Jade would say this, _ he thinks,  _ Dave liked this. Terezi was funny. I can't believe Rose got that joke. Karkat explained himself a lot.  _

Sometimes he is caught within them. He perks up, laughing, scrolling through what little remains of the people he loved near him. He looks at those logs, and seeks friendship with the screen like he had long ago, but all of them stop abrubtly to his disliking. He had his friends, then, and didn't bother with chatting online anymore. But now, he regrets it, deeply so. He cannot rehear every single conversation to have happened between them, and logic of the timeline wins over the missing, aching heart. He is the one who doomed himself here, after all. He will be the one to take on the punishment. 

He gets frisky. He raids his friends old houses, checking in and out of what had been their lives once-upon-a-time. Looks at his ecto-parents lives, trying to figure out what they lived so differently from him and his friends. He even pops into the troll session, a time where their homes were not yet destroyed but they had retreated into the Veil, and pretends carefully like he is a kid invited over for a friendly visit and ends up somehow alone from his friend. He treks over what doesn't interest him, follows what does, somehow always nearly ending up being caught or in sight of someone. He goes through the times and place, all of the inside of what his adventure was, and still finds his heart strained for the presence of his friends. He looks wistfully into the universe, tears trailing his eyes and pleading with imaginative fantasies for how he wishes to be with them. 

The thing doesn't do anything but float there.

When he can't stand staring at it anymore, he floats off to his own home. When he manages to realize that there is absolutely nearly nothing there, he almost collapses on himself until he spots the box of cake mix sitting there tauntingly. 

He notes, almost unrelatedly, he can't remember how his dad smelled like. He knew it was a mix of tobacco and sweets, but the heavy crave of having  _ Dad _ here is almost too much to bear.

He picks up the box carefully, and it takes him three times to actually register what he's read.

By the time he burns his hands three times, he has managed to make too much cake. He doesn't care, as when they are done he sets them aside to cool off and ice later. He does it again, and again, and again filling his kitchen surface and living room space with mixed deserts, sloppy and a little burned because he hasn't made anything in a long time. He makes cakes until he's tired to sleep, and when he falls asleep he has a distant memory-like dream of baking with his dad. When he wakes up, he wipes away the tears and sets off into the kitchen again. When he runs out of materials in his house, he raids Jane's. When he literally bakes everything he can, he travels to Jade's planet and throws it into the volcano.

Then he starts singing to fill the void. 

Little tunes. Humming. Happy notes, he guesses, because he likes all the happy ones and maybe he needs a little of that. Then, he thinks of his friends, and his tune changes to replicate who they are. Karkat's song is long and loud. Jade's tune is short, high pitches with low points. Rose's starts somberly, until it soars into deepness and dark, and then it rises with a new clarity known. He sings, and he sings, and he sings enough that his throat gives out and he transitions his music into the piano, where he plays hard enough against the keys that his wrist hurts. He doesn't stop, except for to sleep, because the silence has been making him crazy and now he needs to keep it out. 

He gets tired, and lonely, so his notes change from fast and high to slow and raindrops. He attempts to play the tune of rain, something he hasn't heard in a long time. And then he cries, because there is no rain outside his window, only the quiet solitude of potentially the rest of his life.

He cries some more, a little bit of everywhere, until he's really tired. When he feels empty, hopeless, and sleepy, he travels to the platform in front of his universe and collapses there in defeat.

He listens to the silence until his dreams come for him peacefully.

He dreams of the void, the one that consumes him for eternity, eating up what little will he has left. He dreams of the silence, where secrets and unspoken things lie, the lost memories or forgotten agendas or abandoned things lay, he among it. He dreams of the empty, where there is nothing. Silence travels through. The world is not dark, but blank. He, for a moment, wishes something more than him could exist. 

Then, his dreams bloom like a blossom. 

It is not as if he is seeing all of them at once. It is rather he experiences them, witness to the thoughts and feelings of each iteration. He lives in it, the possibilities, the directions, each branch that branches off one another. There are, impossibly, trillions. More, perhaps. There is so much, but his dream shows what he wishes for.  _ Life. Friends. Happiness. Love. Living.  _ It is there. Some of them are funny, some of them are charming or weird, some of them seem impossible, but the overwhelming amount of them makes him gasp and tear up. Because, there's  _ so  _ much there. Choices he has made, the new limbs that flourish and grow, the ones withering away that somehow give life to new, younger branches. They stem so thickly at the bottom, twisting and converging, and he thinks there may be a starting point somewhere down below. But, above, it is so many. It is everything he has wished for, and  _ more. _

He awakens, and this time, he does not feel a pang of pain looking at the universe. Instead, he has a plan. He raises his arms, fearful, excited, and concentrates. He breathes deeply, conjuring his wind. Not just what aids him currently, but all of it. Every breeze he's ever felt, every brush of a current. The cooling stream and gust of heat, the rainy autumn days and the chilly winter nosebites, the bleak summer waves and the gentle spring chills. He brings it with him, wraps it tightly, and then focuses his mind on the emptiness around him. 

It shimmers. The void, it's barren and empty, but he grits his teeth and tries harder. He thinks about the physical things, the planets, the homes, the winner's platform. Then, he thinks about the ending point between all of it, the difference of where the figure of existing things stop existing. He thinks of the nothingness, like he has once before, and grabs onto it tightly. 

Everything is coated in his touch. Existence and reality is in his reach. The dimension of the reality he lives in is but a loom weaved under his hand, crossed together to  _ make  _ it, how the rules work, how things play by the rules, what is there and what isn't at the same time. 

He releases his wind, and takes apart the loom. John unwinds reality. 

  
  
  
  
  


Karkat doesn't notice anyone watching him until he gets a brush of a breeze at his neck, tickling him in fascination. He has been busy reconstructing his hive, an ability previously not open to him, and he's been thinking about making it out of a material that wouldn't look ugly in the suburb he lives in. He thinks nothing of the wind until it happens again, and again, and he has to look up at the sky to confirm that it's clearness isn't going to spell rain. He looks around him, checking to see if any of his friends came by to visit, and gets a particularly powerful gust from behind him.

He turns around in confusion, and is greeted by the sight of John.

John waves to him with a sly smile.

_Hey Karkat,_ He says, alive, real. _Is this our world?_

Karkat drops his device he was using to map out plans, struck still with the sight. He doesn't know whether or not to try to believe what in front of him is real. John doesn't move, and although Karkat tries his best, he sees no little hint of illusion or mirage to let him know whether or not he's truly gone crazy.

He stumbles forward, face a mix of hope and sorrow and fear at the same time, and his trembling hand reaches to touch at the human face hesitantly. It feels warm. John smiles with a shivering breath, almost wanting to giggle at his friend's reaction. He then reaches his own hand to settle on top of Karkat's.

In a hopefully soft voice, Karkat asks, _John?_

John's blue eyes shimmer, alive, present in the shining sun. Karkat doesn't know how long he has been walking for, but the dirt around his shoes and edges of his pants are apparent. The land they had all first landed in when they arrived here has since turned into a small forest. John doesn't look like he aged very well, but a sense of age makes Karkat think about how long it has to have been for him. His mouth lets loose a whine of pity, eyes quickly filling with pale tears.

John's own tears feel cool against his heated skin.

_Is this home?_ Is what comes out of the human's mouth, high pitched, as if he is about to break. As if he cannot believe he is welcomed here. Or like he doesn't _know_ he is.

Karkat's lip trembles.

_Of course_ , Karkat responds weakly, voice breaking, and nothing stops him from rushing forward to encompass John into a hug, and finally, _finally_ bring John to his rightful place in their universe - _home_.

**Author's Note:**

> If it's hard to understand, I like to think that John's Heir of Breath powers give him the ability to unwind everything, if he is strong enough for it. He already has powers going against reality's rules, so, why not just rewrite them all together? It's supposed to be as symbolic as it is, well, literal. And, really, my heart can never go long without giving any John a place to go home to.


End file.
